Alerts In Effect

Contact Us

Explore This Park

A Cultural History of the Edison Talking Doll Record

"Things Enough for So Many Dolls to
Say":A Cultural History of the Edison
Talking Doll Record

by Patrick Feaster

The
Edison talking doll routinely comes up in histories of recorded sound as a
pioneering effort to commercialize the new technology, but in spite of that, Edison
talking doll records have received relatively
little attention. In the present essay,
I'd like to give an overview of the Edison talking doll venture centered on the
logic, design, and production of these records. It's my hope that this information will help readers contextualize the few
surviving examples we can listen to today, all of which have been gathered
together in the accompanying web presentation under the auspices of Thomas
Edison National Historical Park.

When
Edison first hit upon the principle behind his phonograph in mid-July 1877, he
seems to have imagined only that it would be used to record rapid speech for someone
to write out on paper afterwards, as an alternative to shorthand.The earliest evidence that he had begun pondering
other scenarios turns up in a note dated November 23, over four months later, and
the very first idea on his brainstorming list was this one: "I propose to apply
the phonograph principle to make Dolls speak sing cry & make various sounds
also apply it to all kinds of Toys such as Dogs' animals, fowls reptiles human
figures: to cause them to make various sounds to steam Toy Engine imitation of
exhaust & whistele [sic]."[1]It should come as no surprise that this was
the first recreational use for the phonograph that came to Edison's mind, since
the talking doll was then already an established commercial commodity. In fact, it was the only regularly
manufactured product based on an older species of "talking machine" which
relied on imitating the mechanical working of the human speech organs by means
of reeds, bellows, and the like. Johann Nepomuk
Maelzel had taken out a French patent on one such "talking doll, which
pronounces the two words papa and maman," in 1823-24,[2]
and in 1850 a doll-maker in High Holborn reported that he was selling "rather
more than a dozen a year at £6 6s. each."[3]By the mid-1860s, talking dolls had become common
enough that an author of children's stories could mention a girl playing with
one on the assumption that readers would know what it was and how it worked:

"Dear little Cushamee—precious little
Cushamee," she said, hugging the doll with all her might, "what are you looking
at with your big blue eyes?"

"Mam-ma!"
cried Cushamee, who was a talking doll.

"Oh! Pussy, did you hear that? She spoke without my touching the wires at
all—at least if I touched them I didn't know it."[4]

Other playthings
had been built in the same spirit to mimic sounds associated with the subjects
they were supposed to resemble, including innumerable mechanical birds and one
toy patented in 1877 that was "designed to imitate the shrill croaking of a
frog" by means of a "croaking spring."[5]In these earlier contraptions, each
individual sound had needed to be studied and painstakingly simulated: imagine an
inventor experimenting with dozens of different springs and spring
configurations, trying to find the one that sounded most like a frog, and
you'll have the right picture. However, Edison
now realized that his phonograph could simply record any desired sounds to be played
back inside a toy—a scenario that promised greatly to increase the range of
sounds toys could make, and to revolutionize the toy market in the process.

The majority of dolls on the market in
1878 were supposed to look like babies or very young children, subjects that
weren't yet expected to speak very well, and that was strategically
advantageous at a time when the phonograph itself still had some growing up to
do: Edison and his colleagues hoped that identifying talking dolls with babies
would encourage listeners to overlook imperfect phonographic representations of
speech, or even to interpret them positively as contributing a touch of
realism. "The Toy problem is the
simplest as it does not require that the talking shall be perfect," argued
Edward Johnson. "Baby's dont [sic] talk when they are born."[6]This was the same reasoning Wolfgang von
Kempelen had followed back in the 1780s when trying to decide how to package a
"talking machine" based on reeds and bellows:

He fancies giving it the form of a five or
six year old boy, because this machine has the voice of a child of this
age. This is also contrived advisedly,
and very sensibly, because the machine has not yet been brought to perfection,
and if sometimes it does not yet articulate the words quite intelligibly, it is
easier to excuse a child that it represents, if it speaks indistinctly.[7]

The older
talking dolls that said "mama" and "papa" had probably been taking advantage of
the same principle. But the newspaper
hype surrounding Edison's phonograph dwelt more on its future potential than on
its temporary practical shortcomings, and that applied to the talking doll
scheme as well:

Each animal in the toy-shop will be given a
tongue, will be heard in his own vernacular, but here only will the phonograph
fail, it cannot reduce to intelligible sounds and translate the varied voices
of the barnyard, the stable, the sheep-pen, the menagerie, or the aviary. We can imagine the delight of the mother's or
the father's darling as she listens to her waxen-faced doll, with curling
tresses and trousseau of the latest fashion, tell the wondrous story of Beauty
and the Beast, reveal the treasures of Aladdin's garden of gems, relate the
chivalric deeds of the heroic knight errant, Jack the Giant Killer, or the
extraordinary adventures of that enterprising youth, Dick Whittington and his
feline coadjutor.[8]

In this
account, phonograph toys were supposed to sound convincingly like the objects
they represented visually—a dog, for instance, would sound like a dog—but the
result in that case wouldn't be "intelligible"; the barking wouldn't be
"translated." Animal toys would "talk"
in their natural voices, but their "speech" wouldn't make sense to young
listeners, and this was presented as a drawback. The writer apparently valued the talking
doll's ability to communicate as highly as—or more highly than—its
ability to mimic appropriate sounds. Little girl dolls could appropriately deliver entire children's stories,
which was a more satisfactory situation from the editor's point of view. Alternatively, the dilemma could be resolved
by producing animals that spoke, at least part of the time, with human
voices. "Dolls and toy dogs can
recite nursery ballads," observed one writer.[9]Another journalist described being shown "a
large frog, which it is proposed to mount alongside the desk, to croak and talk
by turns."[10]There were obvious precedents for the concept
of the talking animal, particularly in children's literature, so such apparent
compromises might actually have enhanced the toys' appeal.

Edison
signed a contract on January 7, 1878, assigning the right to manufacture
phonographic toys to an entrepreneur named Oliver D. Russell. Some of these toys were to be made to
resemble the things whose sounds they imitated: "dolls to speak sixty words or
less, or make various sounds," "toy animals, birds, reptiles, to make various
sounds," "toy male and female human figures to utter sixty words or less," and "toy
engines to whistle and imitate the exhaust of steam," while the "toy targets" mentioned
in the contract were presumably supposed to play back an appropriate sound when
hit. Other categories of toy were to entail
simply stuffing phonographs into boxes as novelties: "a toy musical box which
shall produce but one tune, either vocal or instrumental, and suitable only for
children" and "a toy speaking box, which shall reproduce several sentences,
containing not more than sixty words in all." The sixty-word limit was meant to ensure that talking books weren't part
of the deal—Edison planned to dispose of that side of the business
separately. Lest there be any doubt
about the scope of the contract, it was specified that Russell's product had to
be "strictly a toy for the use and amusement of children, and which shall not
be useful in business transactions or in the arts, sciences, or for any other
useful purpose, other than for the instruction and amusement of children."[11](The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was subsequently
incorporated to exploit the more "serious" uses of the invention.) At the end of April 1878, Russell took on a
business partner, a bell-maker or bell-retailer named Charles Harris who tried
to develop a phonographic "toy box" and engaged John Ott to work on the project
under Edison's supervision at Menlo Park.[12]By May, regular production of doll records
was said already to have begun:"At Edison's laboratory a workman is now kept busy talking nursery
rhymes, singing and whistling into a phonograph, the record to be used for toy
phonographs."[13]Meanwhile, an
electrotyper named William Hollingshead had been working independently on a
process for duplicating phonograms which he had tried unsuccessfully to patent,[14]
and among the prototypes he prepared were some phonographic wheels containing
toy-like sounds "such as crows of roosters, howls of dogs and many other
howls."[15]However, Edison soon put his own
talking-machine experiments on hold to focus on incandescent lighting. In September 1878, the phonograph-toy group
discharged Ott after being told "that nothing more for the present, if at all,
could be done for a Toy Phonograph."[16]The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company
simultaneously found itself relying primarily on the entertainment and novelty
uses of the tinfoil demonstration phonograph for its income when the "standard"
machine projected for practical uses—such as business dictation—failed to
materialize. It now began to argue that
Harris's "toy box" device wasn't really a toy suitable only for children and
therefore infringed the terms of the phonograph contracts.[17]Hilborne Roosevelt, a member of the Edison
Speaking Phonograph Company, ended up personally buying Harris out in October,
but that only made the rights situation even more complicated.[18]Historians like to claim that Edison's
phonograph remained "little more than a toy" for a decade after its invention,
but even its potential as a toy wasn't much exploited during that period.

The
phonograph doll idea finally gained traction in the late 1880s when Edison developed
a practical "perfected phonograph" that recorded by cutting a groove on a wax
cylinder rather than indenting a sheet of tinfoil and another inventor, William
W. Jacques, patented a reproducing mechanism expressly for insertion into toys.[19]The first new prototype doll records mentioned
in the press in June 1888 were wax,[20]
but these were superseded that fall by cylinders made of tin,[21]
perhaps in the interest of durability. The
earliest known surviving doll record is an example of this type: a cylinder of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," which
may be heard as selection one in the accompanying audio presentation; selection two, containing a rendition of "Hickory, Dickory, Dock," comes from another tin
cylinder believed to be of slightly later date. By 1890, the project had reverted back to wax
cylinders, and a talking doll—alias dollphone or phonodoll[22]—was
finally put on the market that April through the Edison Phonograph Toy
Manufacturing Company founded by Jacques and his associate Lowell Briggs. Its commercial debut took place at the Lenox
Lyceum electrical exhibition in New York City in the context of a "Dolls'
Theatorium, where a dozen gayly-dressed dolls recite at intervals such nursery
gems as 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and 'Jack and Jill.'"[23]
The delay had been due in part to the difficulty of designing small,
lightweight mechanisms capable of withstanding whatever children might do to
them, and in part to vicious legal skirmishes that erupted over patents and
contracts.[24]But along with these other obstacles, there had
been the matter of arranging for a supply of suitable records, which is the side
of the enterprise I'd like to focus on here.

One question was who would provide the
phonograph dolls with their voices. For
purposes of general experimentation, Edison's laboratory associates were as
qualified as anyone to do the speaking: "Fred Ott can talk the cylinders on the
doll for you," reads one surviving memo.[25]In the case of a doll record of "Now I Lay Me
Down to Sleep," Edison explained: "it is my own voice, for I speak to the
phonograph and the record is made of the tones of my voice upon the little
waxen cylinder…. It sounds all the more
natural coming from the baby, because the tones of my voice have been reduced
in volume, so that they seem suited to the infant's capacity."[26]The result may have been suited to the doll
in terms of volume, but it wouldn't have been satisfactory in terms of grain: adult
male voices, like Edison's, produced a comically incongruous effect when coming
from dolls physically designed to represent young girls. "The deep, gruff voice of a man reciting
'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' had rather a gruesome effect when issuing from
the lips of a rosy-cheeked little dollie," stated one critic.[27]"The effect of this is very comical,"
commented another, "for the reason that the voice recorded in this infantile
phonograph is that of Mr. Edison, whose tones are harsh and rough; so that the
effect of speech is most grotesque coming from the waxen face of a
sawdust-stuffed doll. It is proposed to
have 'silvery-voiced children' employed for the doll phonographs."[28]"We have some of the dolls here with men's
voices, and they are not a glowing success," Edison
informed yet another reporter, who went on to observe: "Here Mr. Edison wound
up a sweet little creature as an illustration of his last remark. In a hoarse, husky, deep tone the doll
growled out these words: 'Oh, dear mamma, your dollie is tired now; put me in
my little bed, dear mamma.' The effect
was more amusing and instructive than natural."[29]

The
bottom line was that Edison had to find some way of securing young, female
voices to produce his doll records. In
June 1888, the laboratory corresponded briefly with Theodore F. Seward, manager
of the American Vocal Music Association, about his "plan for the dolls'
conversation,"[30]
though it's unclear whether anything came of it. "The great difficulty," Edison told a
reporter that November, "has been to train girls to talk with sufficient
distinctness to the phonographs, but that we are now overcoming. "The reporter added: "There were two young
ladies in the room at the time who were continually talking to the tiny
speaking machines, which a skilled workman was turning out in great numbers."[31]A week later, Edison was again reported as
having "some young ladies busy repeating Mother Goose poetry and all sorts of
babyish expressions into the talking machines,"[32]
and in August 1889 Edison's associate Charles Batchelor requested that the toy
company specify some material so that trainees would have plenty of time to
work it up for recording purposes:

We are now commencing to train small voices
to talk on to the cylinders for these phonograph toys, and should be glad to
have from you a list of all the little verses that you would be likely to want
put on them. It matters a great deal
just how the thing is said in the phonograph.Therefore we should like to have them before hand to get our small
voices well practiced in the art.[33]

The
following month, the toy company's general manager, Edgar S. Allien, consulted
a New York City
talent agent named E. L. Fernandez about the possibility of enlisting some of
her stage children for doll phonogram work. Fernandez couldn't spare anyone, but she suggested that Allien run his
own advertisement for "a number of very bright little girls" and select those
with "the best voices and most perfect pronounciation [sic]." After a few days of training, she advised, the
girls could be boarded during the week at a special "nursery" in Orange: a
furnished house with a cook, supervised by a "lady who would assist the girls
in their voice culture."[34]At a time when no reliable means had yet been found for duplicating
phonograms in large quantities, the mass-production of phonograph dolls would
indeed have required a colony of full-time girl recordist-performers. Whatever arrangements were finally made to
produce doll phonograms for commercial sale, they have left little in the way
of solid documentation. One comment
appeared at the start of 1890, when only a few dolls had yet been completed:
"For several weeks they have had Orange children at the laboratory talking,
laughing, crying and singing in all sorts of ways to the phonograph in order
that their chatter may be reproduced by the doll."[35]After the dolls actually went on sale in
April, the Scientific American published an engraving of a young woman
sitting in a cubicle before a recorder fitted with five wax blanks and speaking
into a small mouthpiece. The
accompanying article states that this illustration

shows the manner of preparing the wax-like
records for the phonographic dolls. They
are placed upon an instrument very much like an ordinary phonograph, and in the
mouth of which a girl speaks the words to be repeated by the doll. A large number of these girls are continually
doing this work.Each one has a stall to
herself, and the jangle produced by a number of girls simultaneously repeating
"Mary had a little lamb," "Jack and Jill," "Little Bo-peep," and other
interesting stories is beyond description. These sounds united with the sounds of the phonographs themselves when
reproducing the stories make a veritable pandemonium.[36]

Eighteen
women are supposed to have been hired for this work,[37]
and cost estimates suggest that they received something on the order of a
couple cents per record.[38]

In
some cases, a transparent fiction was maintained that these employees weren't
busy making records hour after hour, but were instead "teaching" the dolls to
speak. During the Christmas shopping
season of 1888, Edison's secretary Alfred Ord Tate had replied to inquiries
from children with a form letter explaining that "Mr. Edison has some dolls
that are learning to talk and which we at one time hoped to have ready for
Santa Claus at Christmas. It has taken
longer to teach them to speak correctly, and they cannot be ready before
Easter."[39]The real mechanism enabling the dolls to
speak was apparently a secret Tate didn't want to reveal to the children who
would eventually be playing with them, lest it spoil the illusion of sentience. Besides, the idea that a newborn phonograph
"learned" the phrases it spoke had been part of the discourse since the tinfoil
era.[40]The following spring, a newspaper described
the education of these "remarkable elocutionists" in similarly whimsical terms:

As each doll reaches the proper age
it is turned over to a governess specially employed to train its phonographic
ideas how to shoot. This lady gives the most careful attention to the
education of the dolls. She recognizes the value of individual training,
and imparts separate instructions to every doll. Knowing the great
imitative power of little folks, she is particular to modulate her voice to
just the pitch which she wishes theirs to assume. The doll pupils are
required to repeat her words until every accent and inflection is
satisfactory. The dolls have such wonderful memories that not only do
they repeat their lessons with accuracy, but they even "hold the voice." This faculty of theirs compelled the
employment of lady instructors.[41]

The savvy
reader could presumably have seen through the fiction well enough to infer that
doll records were being created on an individual basis by women who had to
adopt appropriate inflections and pitch as part of their work. Opinions varied at the time as to how well
these women were accomplishing that goal. During the experimental period, one sample doll's talk was described as
follows:

The "cannot hurt me" were given with the peculiar rising inflection which an
injured child would use if she were replying to the allegation of some
companions that she was a "tattle tale," or something equally as bad.[42]

The voice
was appropriately "childish," and the intonation impressed the listener as
fully congruent with the "sticks and stones" phrase in its expected social
context. On the other hand, one
stockholder informed Edison that mothers found the doll voices "'too high & squeaky, to be natural'—tho' it may not be in the power of man [sic], to imitate
nature any more closely,"[43]
and another critic described the doll's voice as having "a tiny Punch and Judy
tone."[44]
Yet
another stated:

The Edison
phonograph dolls have just been put on sale in London and Paris, but they seem
to have proven a disappointment so far in New York. The supposed words or verses which are ground
out in a flat, uninflected whine, do not appear to come from the 'talking'
doll's lips at all, and during her most impassioned recitations, such as 'Mary
Had a Little Lamb,' the doll's eyes and lips remain still and motionless.[45]

Some earlier
prototypes had apparently been provided with moving jaws,[46]
but that feature hadn't made it into commercial production, causing the dolls'
talk to appear all the more unnatural. Phonograph
historians have since characterized the speech on the doll records in even less
flattering terms. René Rondeau writes
that surviving doll examples "are indeed unpleasant, with distinctly witch-like
recitations. It is easy to imagine how
unappealing—even downright frightening—these would have appeared to a young
child in 1890, especially if turned at an incorrect or uneven speed."[47]You're
welcome to form your own opinion by listening to the eight examples in the accompanying audio presentation.

Another question that had to be resolved
was what the dolls should say. In
the experimental period of the late 1880s, the laboratory had mocked up "little
dolls that told about Mary's little lamb and Jack and Jill and waited
clamorously for pie and cake, and, in fact, said all the things that a baby
says."[48]Any childlike talk was considered appropriate
subject matter. At the start of May
1888, Batchelor told one reporter that a phonograph-doll mechanism was
"arranged to say, 'Mamma, I love you,' and the saying repeated over and over
again by turning a small crank."[49]That November, another sample doll was heard
to utter the statement: "I love you, mamma; I love you dearly, mamma, but I am
tired and sleepy now. Please put me in
my little bed."[50]However, short nursery rhymes came to be
adopted as the norm. J. T. Spalding, a
toy company stockholder who sent frequent unsolicited letters of advice to Edison, wrote at the end of 1889: "It must be very hard
to find things enough, for so many dolls to say, & keep up a proper variety
of expression, for them!Thinking of
this, I have tried my hand at a few rhymes, I enclose, to see if I can help you
a little in the matter." The rhymes themselves
don't appear to have survived, but we can form a general impression: in a follow-up letter Spalding urged that the
phrase "fondly with kisses" be substituted for "daily with kisses" in one of
them. She preferred not to be identified
publicly as the author of the doll verses but volunteered to compose a
customized message for a phonograph doll to be sent to Queen Victoria if Edison
liked the idea.[51]

One
benefit of using well-established rhymes was that they were already familiar to
adult listeners, who would not have to strain to understand the words. When talking dolls were a month away from
hitting the market, Spalding herself commented: "they do not yet speak distinctly
enough I am afraid—not so that you would understand them, if you did not know
what they were going to say!"[52]The repertoire of Edison dolls was
accordingly restricted to well-known verses, many of which had also been
staples of the tinfoil phonograph exhibitions of 1878 for precisely the same
reason:

One of the
most popular of these doll records was the final item, "Now I lay me down to
Sleep." Considerable effort seems to
have gone into adapting this rhyme to the phonograph-doll medium during the
early experimental period. During the
summer of 1888, Edison told a reporter that
his experimental doll cylinders then had a capacity of one minute (much longer
than the ones finally marketed) and gave the following account of his results
to date:

The accurate
gauging of the utterances of the doll, so that they would come within the
one-minute limit, has cost me a great deal of time and labor. The first line of the prayer is repeated more
quickly than any of the others.

"The second line is a little slower and
runs something like the following, "I pray the L-o-r-d m-y soul to k-e-e-p."

"The third line is still slower, and when
printed would read something like this: 'If I should d-i-e b-e-f-o-r-e I
w-a-k-e.'

"The
last line of the original verse is long drawn out, as if the make-believe baby
was getting very sleepy, thus:
'I—p-r-a-y—t-h-e—L-o-r-d—m-y—s-o-u-l—t-o—t-a-k-e.'

"But I have added," continued Mr. Edison,
"a few words to the prayer which, while they do not appear in the original,
still will be found in general use.They
are these, and they die away from the infant's lips as though she were utterly
overcome with weariness":

Here Edison describes an elaborate effort to simulate the
voice of a child not just reciting the prayer but also falling asleep
afterwards. However, the version actually
put on the market two years later was described merely as "ending with a devout
'Amen,'"[55]
as may be confirmed by listening to
selection seven in the accompanying audio presentation. Mrs. H. M. Francis bought a doll equipped
with this piece for an adult friend in December 1890, but it turned out to be
defective and failed to say anything at all. "Of course, this gave him great disappointment," she wrote to Tate, "and
more so for the reason that he had a little girl about the height and possibly
the age of the aforesaid talking Doll, whom he thought might learn this
handsome prayer by hearing the Doll repeat it."[56]Not only was such speech plausible when
attributed to a doll representing a little girl; it could also help children
learn rhymes that adults would otherwise have felt the need to teach them in
person. "Now I lay me down to Sleep" was
also the selection Edison chose by default for a doll to be given to Joseph
Pulitzer for his daughter in May 1889.[57]Of the available selections, it was the one
most explicit in its pedagogical intent, connected as it was with religious
instruction.

The
idea that phonograph dolls could be used to instill particular messages in
children suggested different scenarios—and hence different messages—to
different critics. According to a story
published in the Austrian and German press, one mother had bought a phonograph
doll for her four-year-old daughter without telling her about the mechanism
inside. When she caught the girl telling
a lie, she wound the doll up for the first time and left it repeating the
reprimand: "Children should not lie, never, never lie!"[58]On the other hand, a British critic felt that
the promoters of phonograph toys had misjudged the nature and pedagogical value
of the "doll drama" that a girl typically enacted:

She assumes her doll to be sometimes a
ducky and a darling, but more frequently careless, tiresome, disobedient,
obstinate, and a chatterbox; in fact, she supposes the doll to be herself,
while she, the little girl, is grave, austere, absolute, inflexible…. She plays at being her own mother; but in
reprimanding her doll she has arrived at a thorough understanding of the most
fundamental of moral truths—that subordination is an essential in the work of
life. Bearing these verities in mind,
how, it may be asked, is a little girl to get on with a doll that has always
something to say for herself; that lays down the law; that enunciates ethical
precepts; that may tell her that, though dogs may delight to bark and bite,
children should never let their angry passions rise, and that her little hands
were never made to tear her little brother's eyes?The conditions of the doll drama would be
wholly reversed.[59]

This
objection doesn't appear to have been widespread, but it's true that Edison's market
research had focused exclusively on what physical features were most popular
and what methods of distributing dolls were customary,[60]
rather than exploring what children actually did with dolls and how the
addition of a phonographic voice might affect their usability. It never seems to have occurred to Edison that an eloquent, articulate doll, although
attractive as a novelty, would be less versatile as a plaything than one with a
more restricted vocabulary.One
of the many people who wrote to Edison's
laboratory asking for a phonograph doll in 1889 specified: "If I am allowed any
choice in the matter I prefer the doll that says mamma mamma & c. but any
kind will do."[61]Ironically, "mamma mamma" was just what
talking dolls had already been saying for decades, before the phonograph had
even entered the picture.

Commercial doll record production was
restricted in 1890 to twelve set pieces recited by a workforce of eighteen
low-paid women in cubicles, but previous to this time there had occasionally
been talk of tailoring records to suit individual purchasers and individual
dolls. A talking doll was typically
bought as a gift for a specific person, which made "customized" recordings
desirable. In 1889, a wealthy correspondent in Germany
requested a phonograph doll to give to a particular young lady and specified:
"if possible let her say something about 'Mary' (what is the name of the lady
in question)."[62]At that point, Edison had already been
predicting future doll stores in which the buyer could have records prepared to
order in the voices of their choosing. "Indeed, he may, if he wishes, talk to the phonograph himself, and the
sentence will be repeated in his voice, and with his expression. It will be better, however, for a man
purchasing a talking doll to have his talking to the phonograph done for him by
a girl."[63]This was, once again, because gruff male
voices weren't appropriate for rosy-cheeked little dollies. Not all recipients were expected to be happy
with dolls that spoke in English, either. A. B. Dick took some examples of phonograph-toy mechanisms to Europe to
show to doll manufacturers, but while there he informed Edison: "If I had some
Phonos with me, containing French and German lines it would be a great
assistance, as none of these foreigners with whom I have been dealing speak
English, and their knowledge of the contents of the Phono. is to be obtained
thro' the medium of an interpreter only."[64]Pre-phonographic talking dolls had been
marketable throughout much of continental Europe
without modification, since French and German children were just as familiar
with the words "mama" and "papa" as their American and English
counterparts.By contrast, Edison's
phonograph doll would have to be adapted not only to different languages, but—because
of the exactness of phonographic reproduction—even to different dialects of
English. One critic pointed out
that British customers might rightly object to dolls that spoke with Yankee
accents and American turns of speech such as "blame my cats" and "lawful
sakes."[65]The company reportedly also received an
inquiry from Turkey which "asked that the dolls should be 'instructed to speak'
in Turkish."[66]On the positive side—at least from Edison's point of view—the preservation of accent and
intonation could be exploited to produce dolls that combined ethnically
distinctive physical features with associated speech styles. In 1888, Edison apparently showed a reporter
some experimental examples based on stylized Irish and black types:

He took up a doll
with Galway whiskers fringing its face. It was a doll from the "ould sod."

"I took Judy to the ball,

To the ball, to the
ball,

And she couldn't dance at all,

Not at all, not at
all,"

it sang in a
fine, rich brogue. Without a change of
countenance it yelled:

"I'm a liar; no, I ain't; yes, I
am. You stay here while I go look for
you. Hurroo! Hurroo! Erin go bragh."

A negro doll exclaimed: "Mose, git off dat
hose." With another revolution of the
cylinder the negro doll broke into "Old Black Joe."[67]

Phonographic
dolls of this sort weren't actually marketed at the time, but the possibility
of exploiting such "ethnic" speech in the talking-doll sphere was clearly
recognized. In mid-July 1878, a visitor
to Menlo Park
had already described a considerably more elaborate automaton than those
mentioned heretofore:

At an adjoining table a workman was busily
engaged in putting together the framework representative of an ancient negress,
with a wide grinning face and whom one could almost imagine to be shaking her
sides with laughter. She was seated in
an arm chair. As the mechanic silently
turned a crank with a heavy balance wheel, the automaton turned its grinning
head from side to side, fanned itself with a palm-leaf which it held in its
right hand, and tapped its right foot in time with "Mary had a little lamb,"
which it seemed to utter with its lips. This was followed by a number of plantation and other melodies dear to
the Southern darkey's heart. The old
lady's clothes certainly did not fit her, but they come as near as they usually
do to fitting an over-dressed plantation woman, and the song was almost perfect
as one heard its melody exactly following the time kept by the tapping of the
foot. It was the new telephonic toy, for
the telephone can be made to give a perfect voice to all the familiar automatic
toys.[68]

The
reference to a "telephonic" toy may have been an error on the part of the
reporter, but it's also possible that this automaton's voice was being provided
live through a telephone, since it seems to have been a longer program than the
phonograph would easily have accommodated at this point. In either case, it's most likely that the
arrangement was intended to simulate the effects of a sophisticated
phonographic toy. The aural program was
designed, at least with respect to the plantation songs, to be appropriate to
the stereotyped black woman the automaton was meant to represent. Meanwhile, the manual cranking seems to have actuated
movements in the body of the figure: the turning of the head, the fanning
motions, the tapping of the foot. Such
automaton movements were briefly considered again for talking dolls in 1888,
when it was said that Edison would "also have
some figures with tongues and eyes that will really wag and roll when a spring
is touched."[69]Like the moving-jaw feature, these were
features that didn't make it into commercial production.

Another
novelty that remained strictly experimental in this period was the phonographic
animal toy. One disgruntled talking doll
company stockholder suggested at the end of 1890: "If the doll is a
failure—cannot animal toys become a success?I think a common, natural feathered, & screaming & cursing poll
parrot will pay all expenses, so far incurred—if issued on the market."[70]A phonographic parrot could "parrot" human
speech to comic effect just as effectively as a real parrot could. Indeed, the phonograph had been dubbed "the
parrot of [the] mechanical kingdom" back in 1878,[71]
and the idea of playing on this association wasn't new: according to one
reporter, Edison had already procured a record of the phrase "The tariff is a
tax!" for insertion into a toy parrot he planned to give to some friends of his
who were Republicans.[72]In that case, the association of a campaign
slogan with "parroting" could have served as a clever political caricature,
implying mindless repetition and a lack of understanding, although Edison
himself probably agreed with the sentiment itself. But many experimental phonographic toys were
said to involve species not ordinarily known for producing intelligible speech,
as parrots were. Sometimes these animals
were described as making their own characteristic sounds, as in this account
from 1890:

Edison has not only invented the talking
doll, but he suggests, and through his assistants, is already working on,
phonographic canary birds, which will produce the sweetest notes of that
favorite little singer. Artificial
parrots will give us the same unconsequential sort of nonsense that we always
associate with their originals, and dogs, horses, cats, geese, ducks, chickens,
etc., will produce the various sounds of their kind. The "Noah's Ark" of the future will be a
somewhat formidable importation into a quiet family home.[73]

On the
other hand, one newspaper article of 1888 instead presents such toys as
combining characteristic animal noises with "appropriate" sentiments in human
language:

The Company will
also manufacture dogs that bark and ask plaintively for meat; cats that mew and
call in unmistakable tones for milk; horses that neigh and express a wish to be
fed upon oats; cows that moo and boast of their milk-giving qualities, and
roosters that crow as naturally as the real, live article. The prettiest and most amazing toy that has
so far been made is a little woolly sheep that says:

Ba-a, ba-a, black sheep,

Have you any wool?

Yes, marry have I,

Three bags full.

One for my master,

One for my dame,

And one for the little boy

Who lives in the lane.

Ba-a-a-a-a-a!

The "ba-a-ing" of that toy sheep would
have made a hungry wolf frantic for mutton.

Despite the
supposed appeal to wolves, the headline referred to "A Sheep That Recites 'Baa,
Baa, Black Sheep' in a Very Human Voice."[74]This may have been somewhat incongruous, but
it also made a certain degree of sense. As René Rondeau points out, "The Edison Talking Doll was an important
machine in phonograph history: the first to be sold with pre-recorded records
for home entertainment."[75]The toy was to serve as the vehicle for an
attractive record just as much as the record was to serve as a voice for the
toy, and the opportunity for including intelligible speech in the program may
have been considered too appealing of a novelty to pass up, even if the figure
happened to be a sheep. Indeed, the toy's
exterior seems to have been considered the expendable half of the phonograph
toy package. While canvassing the
European toy industry, A. B. Dick discovered that doll-makers thought his
sample speaking mechanisms were too large and heavy for their intended purpose; unfortunately, a supply of identical mechanisms was already being manufactured
back in the United States. In order to
avoid taking a loss on the mechanisms already built, Dick suggested to Edison
that they be packaged into little boxes and marketed as "toy phonographs,"
which he was sure would sell wonderfully at the Paris Exposition.[76]

But insofar as the main appeal of the
Edison talking doll was its ability to reproduce speech that could be
understood, it seems to have been a disappointment. Once the dolls finally appeared on the market,
any criticism about vocal quality, scripting, or compatibility with the
traditional "doll drama" was eclipsed by complaints about sheer lack of
intelligibility. One reporter in Washington,
D. C. wrote a scathing review under the headline: "DOLLS THAT TALK. They Would Be More Entertaining if You Could
Understand What They Say":

Six
of the speaking doll babies were seated in a row yesterday afternoon in a
down-town shop.... Behind the counter
was a pretty girl with frizzed hair and a coquettish ribbon at the throat,
whose business it seemed to be to keep on grinding out talk from the dolls one
after another.

The first one was
labeled: "Talking Doll No. 1." It had a
placard of considerable size fastened beneath its chin, which said—not the
chin, but the placard—that this doll recited "Old Mother Hubbard." When the pretty girl turned the crank, the
doll said with great distinctness:

"Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah,

Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah;

Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah,

Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah."

It was fortunate that the placard
beneath the doll's chin told what it was saying, else you never would have
guessed it in the world....

Talking doll No.
2—so its placard announced—was accustomed to say, "Now I Lay Me Down to
Sleep." As was the case with No. 1, the
poem in question was printed out in full, so that the listener should be able
to follow without difficulty the verses, which were as follows:

"Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah,

Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah
—yah—yah—yah.

Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah—yah,

Yah—yah—yah—yah—yah
—yah—yah—yah.

Yah—yah!"

That
last "Yah-yah" was "Amen!"You would
never have guessed it, however, unless you had been so informed.[77]

Even an
official specimen of an Edison talking doll
exhibited to a London
court in 1893 produced nothing but "inarticulate utterances" that were "utterly
unintelligible."[78]
The fault presumably lay not in the records, since specimens of those can still
be understood today, but in the playback apparatus. Whatever the dolls were supposed to say, it apparently
all came out—much of the time at least—as yah
yah yah yah yah yah.

The
market for phonographic talking dolls failed to develop as hoped, production had
already ground to a halt within a month of the product launch, and the dolls
themselves were soon being repurposed for incongruous or perhaps even
vindictive uses that had little to do with the original concept behind them. Among other things, they were "often used as
wedding gifts" among "ladies of social prominence,"[79] apparently exploiting their
symbolic value rather than their viability as actual playthings for children. Meanwhile, some other dolls met grimmer
fates. The technologically spoiled American
boy of 1894 was characterized as owning an example of "Edison's talking-doll,
purchased that he may extract the internal phonograph,"[80]
and one reporter had been shown an even more profoundly disfigured doll at
Edison's own laboratory two years earlier:

Its clothing was somewhat disarranged and
its head looked as though an autopsy had been performed upon it. The cylinder was so arranged that it could be
turned backward and the doll made to repeat sentences, beginning at the end and
producing every sound in reversed order. The effect was very much as though some foreign language was being
spoken.[81]

The
laboratory's "autopsy" of one doll was followed by a more methodical program of
destruction. In 1896, the phonographs
were finally stripped out of all dolls remaining in storage, and it's rumored
that Edison buried them on the laboratory grounds, while the dolls themselves
were sold off without voices.[82]One day, recorded voices would indeed become
a common feature of children's toys, but unfortunately for Edison, the idea was
to take a while longer to get off the ground.

Patrick Feaster is a specialist in the history, culture, and preservation of sound media. A co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative and three-time Grammy nominee, he received his doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he now works as Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.

[14] Hollingshead had
obtained a recorded sheet of tinfoil from a Western Union phonograph
demonstration at the beginning of 1878, devised a system for making copper
duplicates, and shared his results with Edison during a visit to Menlo Park on
Feb. 23, accompanied by Joseph Moody. He
filed a patent application for his method in March, but it was rejected. See TAEB 4:264, n. 2; Raymond R. Wile, "'Jack
Fell Down and Broke His Crown': The Fate of the Edsion Phonograph Toy
Manufacturing Company," ARSC Journal 19:2/3 (1987), 6.

[21] "The cylinders were
in reality bands of metal about 2 ½ inches in diameter, about one-eighth of an
inch in thickness, and half an inch wide" ("Dolls That Really Talk," New
York Evening Sun, November 22, 1888 (TAED SC88130a; TAEM 146:357)); "The
sound impressions are on a tin cylinder, large or small according to the number
or length of the sentences" ("Talks With Wise Dolls," New York Press, November 30, 1888 (TAED SC88132A; TAEM 146:359)).

[22] "Dollphone"
appeared in several newspaper accounts from 1888, e.g., "Dolls That Really
Talk," New York Evening Sun, November 22, 1888 (TAED SC88130a; TAEM
146:357); "Phonodoll" appears as a telegraphic address in much of the relevant
correspondence among the Edison Papers.

[25] Edison memorandum, July 6, 1890 (TAED D9060ACK; TAEM 130:490). In fact, the subject
matter of doll phonograms was sometimes indistinguishable from that of other
experimental records. During one early
recording session, Monroe Rosenfeld apparently had his song "Kutchy, Kutchy,
Koo" captured on both a standard cylinder and a smaller doll cylinder. Edison stated: "When I had [?] Mr. Rosenfeld
play over his song 'Kutchy, Kutchy, Coo' for the phonograph, I also took an
impression [?] of the melody and words for the use of my baby [?], so that now
she not only says her evening prayer, but she also sings her little
song—singing the chorus only" ("Edison's Talking Baby," New York World, June
23, 1888 (TAED SC88038a; TAEM 146:266)). Edison himself was once heard singing a passage from Il Trovatore to
a doll cylinder in the middle of the night, according to a recollection by
cartoonist Richard Outcault cited in Robert Feinstein, "The Phonograph in
Hogan's Alley," Antique Phonograph Monthly 3:8 (October 1975), 4. A doll is also reported as having sung the
popular song "Where did you get that hat?" during a visit to the laboratory by
Prince George of Greece ("Prince George Sails Away," New York Sun, July
4, 1891 (TAED SC91057C; TAEM
146:717)).

[30] "Mr. Briggs writes
from Boston expressing much interest in my plan for the dolls' conversation
& is to have a conference with me the next time he comes to Orange. In order to be prepared to give him the best
help I should like to know the speaking capacity or time limit of the doll
phonograph. Please state it both in
words & length of time" (Theodore F. Seward to Edison, June 23, 1888 (TAED
D8847ABB; TAEM 124:160). The reply: "In
answer to your letter to Mr. Edison of June 23d, would say that the speaking
capacity or time limit of the doll phonograph, as we are at present making the
models, is about six or eight seconds, sufficient to be able to get on a small
verse, such as 'Jack and Jill' or 'Mary had a Little Lamb.' Of course it can be made to take much more,
but at present that is what we are doing for the models." Charles Batchelor to Theodore F. Seward, June 25, 1888 (TAED
D8818ANS; TAEM 122:393).

[37] This number is
cited by Dorothy S. Coleman, Elizabeth A. Coleman, and Evelyn J. Coleman. The Collector's Encyclopedia of Dolls (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.,
1968), 209; also by Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest
for Mechanical Life (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 121. The original source for this detail is
unclear.

[38] Of $45 allotted to
phonograms, $20 was designated for "recording." I'm interpreting this as an estimate for 1,000 doll mechanisms, but it
could have been for some other number (ENHS folder D-90-60, 69-page booklet
entitled "Doll," 7-8). Another cost
itemization lists $35 in labor and $21.08 in materials for 1,000 phonograms
(totaling $56.08), but there is no indication of how much of the amount listed
for labor was for recording, and how much for manufacturing the wax blanks
(Batchelor notebook entry, February 28, 1890, p. 124 (TAED MBJ004 frame 64; TAEM
90:521).

[54] "Edison's Talking
Baby," New York World, June 23, 1888 (TAED SC88038a; TAEM 146:266); see
also Musical Visitor 17 (1888), p. 262. However, the supposed one-minute capacity of the phonogram is
contradicted by internal correspondence. The duration of experimental doll phonograms at that time was actually
six to eight seconds, according to a letter from Batchelor to Theodore F.
Seward, June 25, 1888 (TAED D8818ANS; TAEM 122:393).

[64] A. B. Dick to
Edison, May 27, 1889
(TAED LB030084; TAEM 128:132). "Dolls
That Really Talk," New York Evening Sun, Nov. 22, 1888 (TAED SC88130a; TAEM
146:357) mentions a doll that spoke in German and comments: "children, not only
in America, but also in Europe, and even in far off Russia, will be able to
possess dollies that in their owners' native language can talk to them."

[65] "They will supply
dolls which will refrain from 'guessing,' 'calculating,' or 'reckoning' instead
of thinking, and which will forbear from indulging in such purely local
ejaculations as 'Blame my cats!' or 'Lawful sakes!'" (Daily Telegraph,
London, October 31, 1889 (TAED SC89184A; TAEM 146:547).

[71]Denton Journal (Denton,
Maryland), July 20, 1878,
p. 1. The connection was also expressed
in various jokes, e.g.: "How did you catch up the golf dialect so easily,
Madge?" / "Oh, we took our parrot out to the game several days and then we
learned it from her," under the title "The New Phonograph," from Detroit
Free Press, in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 1900, p 26.